Local Surf / Reports, Photos, Weather, News

Indy Features Local Surf Site Ethics

Thursday, October 23, 2008

The Independent has a surf centric issue out today on news racks and online. The Indy's Ethan Stewart sat down with the people behind some of the local surf sites and penned a piece "Santa Barbara, Surfers, and the Interweb". We are probably jaded because we had a nice chat over coffee with Ethan Stewart, but we think this is a great take on surf sites and the effect they have on our everyday surf experience, both good and bad. Ethan also featured Tom Modugno of Goleta Surfing, Jon Shafer of Rincon Surf Blog and Chuck Menzel of Wetsand.

In an incredibly lame attempt to inflate our ego, here is the part Ethan gave ink to on Santa Barbara Surfing:

“If one person writes about a spot - when it breaks, how to get there, or something like that - that information is online forever. All you have to do is Google it,” said Paul Costales. Better known as Pope, Costales has been the mastermind behind Santa Barbara’s longest running surf Web site, SantaBarbaraSurfing.com, since 2001. The site, which was started by former UCSB PhD student Tim Maddux in 1995 as a no-frills, underground surf report resource, has consciously evolved over the years into more of a local surfing community bulletin board.

Purposely avoiding the naming of surf spots save for the obvious such as Rincon, Campus Point, and Isla Vista’s Sands Beach, Pope provides recaps after swell events, pictures, and, perhaps most importantly, links to and short stories about the various goings-on in Santa Barbara’s wave-riding tribe. From coastal preservation issues and supposed shark attacks to the fate of the UCSB surf team and upcoming film premieres, SantaBarbaraSurfing.com keeps its visitors - about 100,000 of them a month - in the loop and better connected, but when it comes to the actual pursuit of finding and riding waves, you are still, at least as far as this site goes, on your own. With uncrowded waves about as easy to find around these parts as an uncrowded freeway in Los Angeles, the restraint, in the eyes of many longtime Santa Barbara surfers, is necessary.

The 100,000 visitors a month would of course be crazy, the site runs something about 100,000 hits a month, and unique visitor stats aren't tracked but would chime in ten times lower or something like that.

Ethan got it right in the story. Surfing was better before the internet. Having no idea how the waves would be when you got to the beach made those good sessions that much more cherished. Consistently going to the beach would score you great uncrowded waves before the coconut wireless kicked in. Sadly, that day is long gone. It is our goal here at Santa Barbara Surfing to try to implement the good things (connecting local surfers, photos, stories) without leaving a footprint on the web we'll regret such as naming spots or providing real time reports.
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Santa Barbara Surfing. Created by Tim Maddux. Continued by Pope.